Magic of March Will Be Lost if Tournament Expands

For the last couple of years there has been much talk from college basketball coaches about expanding the tournament. Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim has been beating the drum, and in December Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said this, “I don’t think we put enough value on the regular season. By expanding to [96 teams], and not having the NIT, you reward everybody who wins the regular season.” To clarify that, he means the regular season champion for each league.

If this were to happen there would be some very clear winners and losers:

WINNERS

Coaches — You cannot blame this gaggle of coaches for trying to save the jobs of their peers. To me that’s what this comes down to, because coaches are the group that would benefit the most from a tournament expansion. More teams making the tournament means less pressure on coaches and easier goals to achieve.

NCAA — The only other group I see benefitting is the NCAA because they will get more money from the televison contract(s). The NCAA is the body that controls the tournament and they can opt out of their contract with CBS after this season, change the tournament format and seek out tens of million more dollars in a new television contract with an expanded field.

LOSERS

Fans — It astounds me that some proponents of tournament expansion say that good teams are getting left out. Sorry, this is not true. The quality of play would suffer greatly. Also, the excitement of the first couple of days comes from real Cinderellas (12, 13, 14 seeds) having the chance to upset really good teams (3, 4, 5 seeds). Seeing a small conference runner up beat a mid-major team will not hold anywhere near the excitement.

Major Conferences — Winning a major conference tournament would mean a lot less if more than half of your league was already going to be heading to the Big Dance. In fact, it may be a detriment because of the commitment it takes to play and win three or four days in a row less than a week before the NCAA tournament starts.

Small Conferences — An expansion to 96 teams would mean that the top 32 seeds (1-8 in each region) would get a first round bye. Small conference programs would no longer have a chance to score a big upset, but would more likely be playing mid-major teams or poor performing major conference teams.

Networks — You may think that the network(s) that is awarded the contract will be a beneficiary of the expansion as well. That may be true, initially. But I think the expansion will do long term damage to the tournament, not to mention the conference tournaments, and eventually hurt the winning bidder(s).

One last thing, contrary to the way it is often presented, every team in a league with a tournament does in fact have a chance to win the national championship. They simply must win their conference tournament to earn their way into the NCAA tournament and then win every game there. There is absolutely no good reason to expand the NCAA tournament.